


Holy Sonnets: Are You Experienced?

by airdeari



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, MT!Prompto, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-06-09 03:18:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15258252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airdeari/pseuds/airdeari
Summary: I always knew MT units were expendable, in a way. Even if no one said it aloud, I knew, because I was surrounded by thousands of units with identical DNA to my own, give or take the modifications and improvements to the genetic structure among successive generations. But that was the day that it hit me that I was going to die someday, and nobody was going to care. Nobody was going to try to save me.I never came to terms with it, not really. In my denial, I tried to be so much better than the others that I no longer became expendable.I raised my gun.





	1. On Being Hit On The Head

**Author's Note:**

> Yep, it's another MT Prompto fic, hopelessly inspired by all those who came before me (biggest shoutouts to [Poor Wayfaring Stranger](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11725950) and [Running Behind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869282)). I feel like every MT Prompto story mutually agrees that he was absolutely terrible at being an MT, so I got the idea in my head of "What if, instead, he was a _really good_ MT?" And so here we are.
> 
> In a lot of ways, he's still pretty terrible at being an MT, but I hope I can bring a bit of a different flavor to this tried-and-true tale. Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy.

_ This is my playes last scene _

 

I didn’t know what I’d done so wrong.

My brain was racing back through the past five minutes, the past day, the past _year_ , trying to find my mistake. I had no water, no food on my person, certainly no medical supplies. My ankle would heal itself into misalignment if I didn’t get to maintenance soon. My head was throbbing hard enough that it was possible I’d suffered a concussion. But the other MT units from my drop ship were fading into dots on the horizon now, and I wasn’t yet thinking about any of those practical concerns, the many reasons I could perish out here.

All I could think about was wondering what I did to make them leave me behind here.

The obvious mistake was that I’d gotten injured. That was an inconvenience to the Empire for the time and supplies it would cost to repair. That was a liability to the patrol when it prevented me from keeping pace or fighting at top form. I didn’t realize it would still count against me even when it wasn’t my fault.

During the drop, my armor had malfunctioned. Our boots were equipped with shock absorbers so we could land on our feet when we jumped from above tree level after the ship’s auto-navigation tech sighted targets in the woods. I knew there was nothing wrong with my form as I landed, because my right foot hit the ground just fine, while my left made a crunching sound I could feel through the reverberations in my bloodstream. Then a second wave shot up through my body, searing and splitting and stinging and wrong. For a moment, I steeled myself with a grimace, thinking I could just buck up and keep moving through the pain, and then somehow, a step later, I was on the ground, clutching my leg and blinking watery eyes, with an ache in my head from a blow I didn’t even remember taking. The first coherent thought to cross my mind wasn’t about what injury I might have sustained, or whether I was in any danger of attack, or even how to get back to my feet—it was just the faint relief that this was a low-priority patrol mission and not a drill, so none of the commanders were here to see me eat dirt.

It was always worse if the commanders caught my mistakes. I could and would be disciplined for inadequacy and failure, sure, but punishment was nothing, punishment was temporary. What was worse was knowing that the commanders would think I was weak.

If I were a good soldier, then despite my missteps, I would still have value. That was the reasoning that carried me from my initial release as a shambling, awkward unit so rarely in training because it was too often receiving maintenance and disciplinary action, to, through sheer force of will, the exceptional unit in its class, the soldier quickest on its feet in its brigade, the sharpest marksman in the whole training center. I wasn’t punished anymore. I was perfection.

Sometimes the Imperial Guards would stare at me in recognition. Sometimes I snuck a glance at the MT units to my right and left at mealtimes and realized I had a few more fluid ounces of gruel in my bowl. Sometimes the straight, hard line of my primary commander’s mouth would quirk up at the edges when he looked at me.

I was a good soldier. They _liked_ me.

But my troop left me behind on the ground when I couldn’t get up. Even when I squinted at the dark horizon, I couldn’t see them anymore. They were gone.

I must have gone down pretty hard after my leg gave out. By the time I lifted my swimming head from the dirt, the troop had already gotten about twenty feet away, marching in step, one unit short of a full patrol. At first I thought maybe they hadn’t noticed I was missing. As a firearms specialist, I stayed the rear of our formation to cover the front lines with my ranged attacks. I opened my mouth to call out, but my voice stopped in my throat from my own conditioning.

There were rules we had to follow as MT units, rules that were explicitly ingrained into us during training and assembly. There were also the little rules no one wrote down or spoke aloud. These ones I had to collect for myself through observation and trial and error. (I was starting to wonder if one of them was that we were supposed to inspect our own armor for defects before going out on patrol, and that’s why my broken ankle and bruised forehead was my own damn fault.)

One of the most basic rules I learned was to never, ever, ever speak, sometimes not even when spoken to. If asked a direct question by a commander, I would answer, otherwise I only ever moved my lips in silent privacy. Speaking was for humans. Humans had orders to give, opinions to express, wants and needs. MT units did not have such things. I sealed my mouth to pretend I had no such things, too.

Instead of speaking, I made another noise to try to catch their attention. With hasty hands, I yanked off my mask and let it hit the hard-packed dirt with a thud and a rattle. They had to recognize me even in the dark, the way the guards all recognized me: the unit with the brightest blond hair, always mussed from my helmet. The unit with eyes so powerfully blue that the signature MT glow only shifted them to a deep violet. One of the greatest units in the brigade. Probably the very best on our patrol.

Maybe all the other units had been pretending, too. Maybe my patrol was leaving me behind because their opinion left unspoken was that they hated me all along.

They hated me for beating them in sparring matches during training. They hated me for getting more gruel at mealtimes. They hated me for all of the ways I was different from them, the ways that the guards and commanders could not see, the ways that I couldn’t fully see either, the ways I’d try so desperately to stay ahead of and add to my own personal set of rules before anyone in charge noticed I wasn’t quite _right_ somehow. I looked right and left when the others stared straight ahead. I mouthed words to myself when the commanders weren’t looking. I thought of myself as _I_ , instead of _we_.

The MT units saw through my act, down to my fundamental flaws, and they hated me.

I thought I was a good enough soldier to make up for all of those little things I couldn’t get right. I thought I was good enough that if I got hurt on an expedition, my patrol would help me. I thought I was worth too much to lose so easily.

I guess I was wrong.

 


	2. Dance

_ Oh, to vex me, contrayes meet in one _

 

“Guess we’re clear.”

If that low, smooth voice had not cut through my thoughts, I would never have noticed the sound of movements. I shifted my ear to the ground to count the simultaneous footsteps, but the distinct voices saved me from making guesswork.

“So we’re just gonna let those MT’s roam the countryside?”

“We’re low on curatives. Best not to seek trouble.”

“It was only a handful, we coulda cut ’em down easy. Farther they get—”

“It can’t be helped, Gladio.”

I could estimate the size of the one called Gladio by the pitch of his grumble and growl. Although the other two men were not so easy to pinpoint, I didn’t worry over it too much, since Gladio gave me more than enough to worry about.

Once, I heard my primary commander mutter something under his breath about me during a combat training session. I had seen my opponent’s hand twitching to fire the training pistol, the line of fire trained a step ahead of my current path. The rubber bullet whizzed close enough to snag on my shirt and then whirl away, almost as if it had hit me and bounced off my chest. And so I clapped a hand over my sternum and doubled over. When I heard the footsteps racing towards me to land a winning blow, I spun around and struck the unit in the dead center of the chest with two bullets. “That one’s tricky,” the commander had said, and when I stole a glance at him, I saw a smile tugging at his lips, so I thought it was a good thing.

Maybe it was just something that made me different, and being different meant being noticed, and being noticed meant receiving punishment, so maybe it had never been good. Maybe, for that reason, being _good_ wasn’t good.

But being tricky was going to win me this fight.

I held a pocketful of breath, closed my eyes, and lay still, one hand resting limp but ready over the grip of my handgun, as the three sets of footsteps approached, as one pair came so close I could feel its vibrations in the ground.

“What’s with _this_ thing?” said the stranger. “Look, it's got an MT suit, but his head is…”

I clenched my jaw and let the soft kick to my back rattle through my body. My chest was burning for air, but he was too close. I couldn't dare breathe, not until I heard the rustle of fabric and the weight shift of the man crouching down beside me and I had snapped up my hand to fire a round into his chest.

I couldn't relish the agonized shout of my shot hitting its mark. It was a hasty, anxious move; I didn't know where the other two men were. In the time it would take me to draw a bead on them in the darkness, they could overtake and overwhelm me in close range combat if they had the skill. I wasn't good enough with the sword—especially not while I was one good ankle short of being able to stand—to take on two foes at once.

I didn't realize until later—probably kind of embarrassingly later—that the man I'd just shot was Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum of Insomnia, heir to the Lucian throne, the Chosen King of prophecy. I sort of knew something weird was going on when I saw two blue flashes turn into a spear and a greatsword, but at the time, all I could think was how lucky I was that they’d turned themselves into glowing targets.

Judging by size, I shot at the greatsword first. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I realized I was going to miss my mark. The way the sword moved in the man’s stride looked funny because it wasn’t closer than the spear, it was just _that big_. The bullet I had fired with the hopes of striking the opponent in the chest probably sailed over his shoulder.

And now the crystalline glow of the weapons had faded into the night, and I’d lost track of the spear. I made a sound I thought I’d trained out of my throat, the one that made the officers look at me in disgust: the breathy, high-pitched squeak of fear.

“Noct!” called the one who wasn’t Gladio, but only his unfamiliar accent linked him to the calm voice I’d heard just seconds earlier. No matter how big the sword was that was charging at me, for a second I wasn’t sure if I was more afraid of it or of the man whose voice had become fire and fury.

Then I realized that rumbling getting louder was Gladio growling, and I was back to being more afraid of the sword.

I heard the blade slice into the ground inches beside my head. I opened my eyes and realized that, one, I had instinctively rolled out of the path of blade at the very last second, and two, I’d done that because I had training for this. Not strictly for fighting with a broken ankle, but combat in enclosed spaces. Movements have to be precisely timed and executed if you’re trying evasive action, and you shouldn’t try it for long. The best defense in situations like these is a good offense.

While Gladio was still muttering curses and wrenching his blade out of the ground, I snatched up my pistol in both hands and fired at him point blank. He started shouting the curses, so that was a good sign I’d struck him.

“Lights, Gladio!” said the accented voice.

In the midst of a frustrated growl, Gladio brought a hand to his chest. With a soft click, light flooded the ground in front of him, then seared into my vision as he turned my way.

I dove for the darkness. I had training for this, too.

I remembered the small shapes of guards on the catwalk high above the dark training grounds, little black shadows against the searchlights they pointed at the floor. Our task was to engage in close-ranged combat, but if we fell into the wandering patches of light, we would be punished with a hail of gunfire from imperial soldiers practicing marksmanship. I remembered what I did when it was my turn to fight and I saw the lights closing in on me.

I couldn’t really say whether I remembered what happened to me after that. I remember pain, but it was all a blur, a blur of yelling and injections and something searing into my back and time stretching longer than it’s ever stretched before. MT units are built to attack, they screamed. MT units aren’t built to save their sorry, meaningless existence, not when a hundred more are lined up ready to replace me when I go down.

Those words said nothing new. I always knew MT units were expendable, in a way. Even if no one said it aloud, I knew, because I was surrounded by thousands of units with identical DNA to my own, give or take the modifications and improvements to the genetic structure among successive generations. But that was the day that it hit me that I was going to die someday, and nobody was going to care. Nobody was going to try to save me.

I never came to terms with it, not really. In my denial, I tried to be so much better than the others that I no longer became expendable.

I raised my gun. When I tried to point the short barrel at the center of the burst of light, I realized my hands were trembling, trained by consequences, too afraid to disobey even after all this time. I was more afraid to disobey than I was to die a meaningless death.

Gladio’s sword came up over his head, the sharp blade aligned with the length of my body.

If I died fighting here, no one was lined up to replace me. So maybe I was allowed to break this rule, just this once.

The sound of shattering glass was much softer than it had been when I shot the enormous bulbs in the training grounds, just a subtle tinkle all but masked by the echo of gunfire. But the pop of the light was the same: like the darkness had swallowed it up into nothingness, leaving a searing, flashing spot in the center of my vision that lingered even when I blinked.

Right. So this made _him_ blind, but it also made _me_ blind. That was twice I’d screwed myself over by trying to be tricky without thinking ahead.

Through sheer upper body strength, I kept my movements soft and almost soundless as I scrambled back from Gladio. He had frozen in his swing with a startled sound as soon as I took out his light. Once I had what I hoped was enough distance from him, I blinked furiously through the patch of blindness, watching its shimmering edges shrink inwards.

“What happened?”

“He—he shot my _light_ out!” Gladio yelled in a voice that would sound more angry if it weren’t awash with disbelief.

There was another little click. Then, brighter than the spots in my eyes, a faraway face glowed in the darkness, tense with pain, and tightening to recoil from the flash of light. I’d spent my whole existence as a clone surrounded by other clones, and yet the first thought that struck me when I saw this boy with glossy black hair and a soft face was that I saw myself in him, kind of. I could sense that somehow, we were the same.

Then the light passed over Gladio, and boy, he was scarier when I could see him. In the half-second’s glimpse I got of him, I could count every abdominal muscle running up his huge chest. I almost froze too long to skitter out of the way when the light swept towards me.

“Where’s it gone,” said the man with the light, with a voice like venom.

“Iggy, don’t,” rasped the boy on the ground. “Gladio…”

I saw Gladio’s backlit edge shudder at the sound of Noct’s voice and turn as soon as he was called. The man who must have been Iggy, judging by the way the light coming from his chest wavered when Noct spoke the name, fell suddenly still.

I had two sets of instincts fighting in my head when I raised my pistol. One was from my training, and it said _gun down the strongest opponent now, while you can still see him_. The other was from my stomach, and it said _shoot out the other light and hide_.

With a twitch of my finger and a quick bang, it was dark again. Iggy made a sound almost like a scoff when the bullet ricocheted off of his chest. My stomach was still twisting, this time with guilt from stepping on every rule I’d sworn to follow and snapping them like twigs under my feet as I ran away from my calling.

“The hell’s it doin’?” Gladio growled. There was light enough in the dusk to see the shining edge of his massive sword rising, and that was motivation enough to move slowly, cautiously, silently backwards.

“It’s not—he’s not an MT,” said Noct weakly.

The words caught on my throat in a way I didn’t understand. For a fatal second, I fell still, letting a sudden wave of pain run through my body. This pain felt different from the jolts I got every time my broken ankle brushed against the ground underneath me, or from the flashbacks of discipline that kept replaying while I kept retreating instead of fighting at full force as I was trained.

I wasn’t an MT.

I wasn’t like the other units. I stood out. I messed up little things. I didn’t think the right way. I backed away from my foes like a coward, when MT units are built to _attack_.

“Then what the hell is it?!”

What the hell was I?

If the answer wasn’t _MT unit_ , I was pretty sure it was _nothing_ , and that’s why a second later I was firing my gun again and again in the direction of Gladio’s gleaming sword. Because MT units are built to attack.

Then again, MT units aren’t built to freak out in the middle of a fight and forget how many bullets they’ve fired, so that was another nail in my coffin. I was at five when I took out Iggy’s light, but I couldn’t remember if I’d let three or four go after Gladio now, and how many fit in the magazine for this model, anyway, was it twelve or sixteen or—

When my gunfire faltered in the midst of my frantic arithmetic, I heard Iggy’s feet. Noct yelled his name, but by that time I’d already had to duck out of the way of his spear.

“MT or not, it’s trying to _kill_ us,” Iggy said with controlled rage. “I’ve no choice if it won’t leave us alone!”

_If_.

I hadn’t had a lot of choices in my existence. I didn’t even really choose to become a rifleman; the commanders just put me on that track because I was better with guns than I was with the other weapons. I didn’t choose what I ate, what I wore, when I woke or went to bed, what I did with my time. The only concept of _choice_ I’d ever had were things like, which opponent should I shoot first, or where on its body should I shoot, or should I change positions for a better vantage point, and even with those choices, there was really only one right answer, and that was whichever one helped me win the fight. Everything was about winning the fight. It had never even occurred to me, not even now that I was out here on my own, that I could choose not to fight at all.

MT units aren’t built to hit themselves in the stomach with their pistol as they let it slip out of their sweating hands.

I still had that compulsion to attack ingrained in every fiber of my being. It gnawed at me when I found myself lying unarmed underneath Iggy’s spear. My brain was whirring with all the ways I could kill him—snatch up the gun and shoot before he could react, sweep my good leg into his feet and topple him, grab the spear and leverage it against him. Instead, I crossed my arms in front of my neck, turning the armored plates outwards.

Because MT units are also built to die.

The tip of the spear came rushing down towards my gut. I squeezed my eyes shut and cringed. My pathetic final thought was, if MT units are built to die, at least I was still doing _something_ right.

Something swiped against my stomach, but I didn’t feel any pain or sting. I heard the soft tumble of something against the dirt. When I managed to keep breathing, I realized I was missing the weight of the handgun on my chest. I peeled one eye open, then the other, and saw it lying well out of arm’s reach. A spear hung over my head, aimed at the soft flesh under my jaw.

“Who are you?” asked Iggy.

In the back of my mind, I recognized it as a direct question to me, but it didn’t even occur to me to answer. My mouth hung open and dry as I crossed my eyes to stare along the blade pointed at my neck.

I wasn’t supposed to speak. I was so good at following that implicit, overbearing rule. Even at the sight of a greatsword swinging towards my head, I kept my mouth shut, no matter how much I wanted to scream.

It was a hard hit to my forearms, but no harder than anything I’d faced in training. Once the rattle of the initial blow faded from my bones, it was easier than I thought it’d be to force the blade back a few inches, far enough that it felt safe to breathe. Gladio made a startled noise and started pushing harder, but I could still hold him steady.

“What the hell _are_ you?!” he yelled.

I didn’t even _have_ an answer to that question anymore.

“You are not in a position to withhold information.” Iggy’s sinister, cool voice made my skin crawl when I heard it up close. “Give me your name.”

I didn’t speak unless ordered. I only answered direct questions from my commanders. Iggy was ordering me to give my name, but he wasn’t a commander. Besides, I wasn’t really sure what he meant by my _name_.

“ _Answer_ , dammit!” Gladio roared, and if Iggy’s voice got under my skin, Gladio’s dug into my stomach. By the time the wave of nauseous fear rolled away, my crossed arms were pushed all the way back until they were squishing my neck. I felt a line of cold start to burn along my throat. I couldn’t tell if Gladio was pressing the sword deeper and deeper, or if the presence of the edge of his blade in my skin was just stinging more and more the longer it stayed where it wasn’t supposed to.

I didn’t want to speak. I really didn’t want to. It made my heart stutter every time, even when I was responding to a commander, because it always felt wrong, it felt so close to making a mistake, and this _was_ a mistake—this wasn’t a commander, this was an opponent, probably an enemy of the empire from the way they were talking about Magitek, so how could I answer _them_ of all people—but it was just my identification, wasn’t it, wasn’t that safe to say, I said it so many times in the training center and holding stations, sometimes even to low-ranking Guardsmen when the barcode scanner had a glitch or didn’t recognize my almost-obsolete class ID—

And _that_ was what it felt like when the sword went deeper into my skin.

“Unit 05953234 class NH-01987!”

I hadn’t heard my voice in a little while, but I didn’t think it usually sounded that high-pitched. It had never hurt so much to make a sound before either, like the words were scraping on the back of my throat. I wasn’t sure whether I’d squeezed my eyes shut to brace myself against an impending slice through my neck, or out of fear of the vague notion of punishment that _must_ be waiting in the wings for a unit who had spoken out of turn.

Between the blood rushing through my ears and my heavy, fast breaths, I didn’t realize everything had gone silent, until Gladio disrupted the stillness with a soft, “What the hell?”

I took in a sharp, stuttering breath as Gladio eased the sword back up a few inches. Although it hadn’t gone more than skin-deep into my neck, the cut still stung as the blade shifted away. Iggy’s spear, however, only came closer.

“With whom does your allegiance lie?” he asked next.

This, I could answer without hesitation. This was a drill from those first weeks when we were too new for combat training, when our only obligations were receiving infusions of the strengthening serum, building muscle and coordination, and absorbing necessary knowledge from videos, pamphlets, and lectures from our future commanders. He worded the question differently than the commanders, but the verbal response was still immediate on my tongue: “We serve the Great Niflheim Empire!”

I didn’t realize how pathetic it would sound when I wasn’t surrounded by a throng of other units shouting the same thing. Suddenly the Niflheim Empire didn’t seem that great. Suddenly I didn’t even feel like I knew what the Niflheim Empire even was. Suddenly I was wondering if my entire life had been a puppet show cast in smoke and mirrors.

“So it’s an MT.” Gladio’s low growl had gotten louder again. “ _This_ is an MT?”

I felt a moment of clarity when he called me that, and with it, a wave of tranquility, after all that had shaken my identity. I exhaled pride, only to inhale fear when I realized Gladio was drawing up his sword to strike.

“Gladio,” Iggy said in a low, threatening tone.

Gladio’s arms tensed. He didn’t lower his sword, but he didn’t swing it, either. He thrust one empty hand down towards me in gesture, yelling, “Are _all_ MT’s like this inside?!”

“ _Are_ they?”

Metal as cold as Iggy’s voice touched me under the chin. No sharp edges yet, but I knew a warning when I felt one. I should have been able to avoid speaking for this one, but I didn’t have room to shake my head with a spear pressed up against me. “No,” I whispered, holding my jaw clamped shut.

“No?” repeated Iggy curiously.

It sounded just like the kind of suspicious “no” that someone uses when they know you’re lying to them, the kind that comes just before the shouting, the hitting, the starving, the injections, the punishment. I seized up with such a jolt that I nicked myself on the spearhead. I didn’t know what I’d said wrong. It was true; there were no other MT units from my class designation, not anymore.

“No—y-yes,” I croaked, because if “no” was the wrong answer, then “yes” had to be right.

“Well, which is it?” Gladio growled.

This was worse than suspicious. This was exasperated. This was the start of the shouting, and the rest would follow. It had been so long. I’d been so good, so careful to stay in the lines, so obedient, so quick, so perfect, only to fail again.

“Stop talking to him. It doesn’t matter.”

Noct was much closer now, probably just behind Iggy. He took Iggy’s focus enough that I felt the spear float away from my clammy skin. I wondered if I could still run if I just ignored the pain that would come every time my left foot hit the ground. That pain would be better than what was coming to me if I stayed here.

“I don’t care what he is, or who he is, or whatever.” Noct’s voice broke with a hurt too heavy just to be from the bullet I’d lodged in his chest. “If he serves Niflheim, then kill him.”

Swallowing a gasp, I raised myself a silent couple of inches off the ground by my elbows and my good foot. Not too much that they’d hear me, or that my chin would run back into Iggy’s distracted spear. Enough that I wouldn’t make a sound if I started to slink slowly backwards out of range of attack, or maybe towards my gun.

Iggy released a quick sigh before he spoke. “Noct, I understand how you feel, however—”

“You _don’t_ ,” Noct cut in. “You _don’t_ understand. You lost your king, I lost my _father_.”

I had a vague notion of the word _father_ in the edges of my mind, just enough recognition to know it was someone deeply, deeply important to humans, maybe even more deeply than I’d ever understood until I heard the way Noct said the word. Something about it stuck into my gut. I could have snuck towards my gun and grabbed it at this point, but suddenly I really didn’t want to. Suddenly I felt sick.

“Some of us lost both,” Gladio said in a low voice.

I felt _really_ sick.

“And yet, Gladio still sees the value in taking this Niflheim representative alive for the sake of gathering intelligence, doesn’t he?” Iggy responded.

In my head, I heard the loud echoes of lectures on the proper methods of self-immolation. It wasn’t enough to disrupt and end our vital functions rather than fall into the hands of the enemy, because they could still harvest the precious DNA from our remains if we weren’t properly destroyed. The canister of gasoline was the first item in the required inventory for any external mission, and the method to unlock the fuse switch and ignite was repeated at the end of every debrief. My head was throbbing with all the sounds, all the thoughts, all the fears, overflowing until the excess flooded down into my stomach. The last time I could remember feeling this sick, I—

Oh, no.

This was bad. This was worse than any of the other rules I’d ever learned or been taught. This was worse than violating a direct order from a commander. This was worse than the drag of someone’s blade across my back as I bolted into the darkness. This was worse than every movement jostling my broken bones and searing up through my body in something so painful it felt like a scream. I needed to get away, I needed to hide. I couldn’t let anyone see this.

There were no other units from class NH-01987 anymore. I was the last one, and I had learned from their mistakes. The ones who hacked up the smoking black bile after their infusions later left holes in our unit’s formation at roll call. Patrolmen dragged their ashen bodies, still retching, to the maintenance wing, tailed by researchers muttering about _resistance_. The very first rule I learned in my conscious existence was to swallow the burning, thick, vile substance back down if ever it came up my throat, to risk vomiting only in those rare moments I could not be seen. Within weeks of the NH-01987 release, I was the only one left standing in our block at roll call, holding my body still through the shudders of silent coughs as I tasted the poison in the back of my mouth.

Just swallow it back down, I thought, in vain.

A hand grabbed my dragging ankle and pulled, and a nauseous wave rolled through my entire body. When my mouth flew open to scream, the only thing that came out was sludge, and so much of it. I sputtered it up in three burning heaves and thought for sure there couldn’t be anything more left in me, but when a foot came down on my back to hold my writhing body in place, I choked out even more. A large hand clamped down on the back of my head and shoved my face down. What had eroded my throat and my mouth like cold acid was fiery when it came up in my nostrils as I tried to breathe. I thought they meant to asphyxiate me. The ache in my starved lungs and the agony running inside my head and neck felt far worse than what I’d ever thought burning alive would be like. Only when I tried to push my hands to the killswitch under my abdomen, and only after several futile attempts to move my numb limbs, did I realize my wrists were pinned to my back.

They said I seemed like I was awake for a little longer, but I didn’t remember anything after that.

 


	3. On Being Hit On The Head (reprise)

_ Why are wee by all creatures waitèd on? _

 

In the midst of the fog, I heard “barcode”, then “ID number”, so I gave mine immediately: “Unit 05953234, class NH-01987.”

Then I heard it again, from a different voice. “… _that_ ID number?”

The way they phrased it seemed weird, but I couldn’t think hard enough to figure out how. I just said my ID again. It was a test of alertness. I was alert.

“…keeps saying it,” said someone else.

So I kept saying it. “Unit 05953234, class NH-01987. Unit 05953234, class NH-01987. Unit 05953234, class…”

I wondered why they wanted me to keep talking. They’d ascertained my alertness with the first response. If they needed continued monitoring, then something devastating must have happened to my body.

The instant I remembered my ankle, I _felt_ it again, a renewed shock of pain running up my broken bones. My voice choked out in the middle of the umpteenth repetition of my unit code, and my eyes shot open into bright, blinding white. I squeezed them back shut with a grimace, breathing loudly through my teeth.

My ID. I had to keep giving it. I restarted, my voice weaker than before. “Unit 0595…”

“Hey, you okay?”

Though the voice was close, that was the tone that guards and researchers and commanders took with each other, never with MT units. It couldn’t have been a question for me. I hesitated between numbers for only a beat before I kept reciting the code.

“What’s your name?”

It was an unfamiliar voice saying it, but it brought back the vague, dark outlines of those three men from the night patrol that went so wrong. The ones who had asked my name, and other questions I didn’t know how to answer. The ones who had seen my greatest fault.

I opened my eyes again. This searing light hanging over my head was the same one from the maintenance center. This was where the MT units of class NH-01987 had all gone before me, and this was where I, too, would disappear.

I jerked myself into movement, but belts strapped me in place. I was horizontal, restrained all the way from my shoulders down to my shins. My inner elbow had a dull sting in it and a lingering ache, and a short length of rubber tubing ran down my arm from that point. It was a foggy, familiar sensation, the same as the early days of the infusions.

“Hey, it’s alright,” someone said. “You’re safe. You can hear me, right?”

“Yes,” I squeaked once I heard a question. After too great a fraction of a second, I corrected myself, holding a more respectable pitch in my voice. “Y-yessir.”

“ _Sir_ ,” the voice repeated back to me, on a puff of air I thought I could feel on my face. “Hey, you’re out of Niflheim, y’know?”

I didn’t know. “Yessir.” I didn’t even know what that really meant, _out of Niflheim_.

“No, I mean—stop calling me _sir_.”

The words were constructed in the sequence of a command, but the man was laughing as he said it. He barely sounded like a man at all. He sounded like the boyish imperial soldiers in training who used MT units as their punching bags and shooting targets.

A silhouette cut through the overhead light, fuzzy at the edges where his hair feathered out from his face. He was out of his armor, so I squinted for his face. I wanted something to recognize him by—was his face one that I knew, belonging to one of the commanders or the usual guards, or did it look so very similar to my own, like with the other MT units—and everything I saw was so new it took my breath away, yet so familiar it felt like home.

His skin was a warm color I didn’t know skin could be. There was something unusual about his eyes, too—their hue, their shape, their inexplicable depth. His was the soft face I had seen in pain during the night, but now it was smiling, and I felt more attached to it than ever before.

I thought about that phrase again, _out of Niflheim_. It felt like a dream.

“Hey,” said the young man. “I’m Noct.”

“Yessir,” I mumbled.

He laughed. My body went rigid, eyes darting around. I hadn’t said the right thing. I was supposed to say something else. I wasn’t supposed to say anything. I’d made a mistake, and I didn’t know what it was, or how to correct it, or—

A warm hand grabbed my shoulder. The straps kept me from flinching away. I expected pain of some form—a forceful pull, a chastising blow, the pull on my skin and muscles before a thick needle injected dense milliliters of serum into my deltoid—but it was only warmth.

“Hey,” said a gruff voice that, after a delay for recognition, sent a chill down my spine. “S’alright. He said you’re safe.”

I had thought of the word “safe” as meaning just “out of danger” until I took my first breath after Gladio spoke. It was a deep, quiet breath, one that filled my lungs from the bottom first. Even if it smelled like the sting of antiseptic, it felt nice in my body. I didn’t know voices like Gladio’s could sound gentle. I was so used to them hurling commands and abuse and little else.

“He must be confused from the concussion.” A small distance away, I heard Iggy’s accent. “Gentlemen, I believe you’re in the way.”

The two of them mumbled apologies and stepped back from the examination table. My shoulder felt cold without Gladio’s hand. I twisted my head to see where they were going. Noct met my eyes with an expression I couldn’t fully parse—something a little bit surprised, maybe, but also a little bit sad—before someone with a white coat cut between us.

All three of these men had seen me vomiting black, so they had taken me to a researcher.

She looked like no other researcher I’d ever seen. There were lines on her face, like with the most respected commanders, and so too was her dark hair twined with luxurious silver. Her lips and fingernails were colored in rich, shiny burgundy. An opulent crest of glittering gems and gold hung around her neck. I’d seen portraits of the Emperor in jewelry like this—more jewelry, of course, because no one could outrank the Emperor—but she must have been somewhere close. Someone important. The commander of the researchers, maybe. The one with the authority to dispose of a faulty unit.

She gave me a smile that looked sweet, and said, “I’m just going to take your blood pressure and temperature to start,” and there was no way for me to run, so I lay there and waited for the end.

She wrangled a velcro cuff around my bicep in the small bit of space between my restraints. As it squeezed my arm, she picked up the thickest needle I’d ever seen, and then she pointed it at my face.

“This’ll go under your tongue,” she said, slipping the needle between my lips as soon as I opened my mouth to breathe.

I tried not to shake as the metal jabbed at the soft, sensitive tissue in my mouth and the cuff squeezed me so tightly that it cut off the blood flow to my hand.

The needle did not pierce. Out of dire curiosity, I flicked the tip of my tongue over it, and found a blunt, round point at the end. Something beeped, and she removed the dull needle. The cuff began to let go of my arm. The researcher frowned.

“Honey, are you feeling okay?” she asked.

Behind her, Noct took a step forward. “What’s wrong?”

With one last wary glance at me, she turned to Noct. “His blood pressure and pulse are _very_ high.”

“Could it be possible he’s suffering from a bit of white coat hypertension?” suggested Iggy.

“Or,” muttered Gladio, nodding in Iggy’s direction, “it’s because he’s not really…”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Iggy didn’t need him to; both of them just stared at me. Noct was staring, too. With the loud scratch of velcro, the researcher removed the cuff, looked it over, and then circled around the table to wrap it around my other arm.

“Hey, uh,” Noct said, cutting through the silence. His eyes were still on me. “You… you really are safe right now, alright?”

_Safe_. Just like when Gladio had said it.

“I dunno what happened to you before we found you, but,” Noct went on, scratching the back of his head, “but it’s over now, so. Everything’s fine now.”

The cuff hummed and started to grip again. I watched it swell bigger. I felt my pulse throb against the pressure, each beat taking longer than the last.

The researcher said, “That’s a little better,” once the cuff deflated again, but she sounded doubtful.

“What does it mean?” Noct asked, taking another step forward. “If his blood pressure is high. And his pulse.”

She made a face as she removed the cuff from my arm again. “Well…”

“If you’d step back from the table and let the doctor complete her examination in peace,” said Iggy, “we might learn the answer.”

The researcher shot a glance at Iggy, and a bit of a smile. She began additional procedures, some familiar, some foreign, but all so much slower than I was used to, and with narration. I had never known why researchers would flash lights into my eyes until she murmured about observing how the pupil responds to light, and examining the back of my retina. Nor had I known that the device attached to her ears was called a stethoscope, and that she used it to listen to the activity of my heart and lungs. She hesitated before pressing it to my chest, frowning as she listened through a thin layer of light blue cloth. She lifted it, then almost pressed it down on top of one of the straps holding me in place. Her burgundy lips tightened.

“Is… are you sure we need to…” She gestured along my body. “I can’t—examine him like this, do we really need to…?”

Then everyone was looking at me. Commanders didn’t like when I looked at them when they weren’t addressing me, so I looked away. Then I wondered if they _were_ addressing me, and commanders _really_ didn’t like when I _didn’t_ look at them when they _were_ addressing me, so I looked back up. I chose the researcher’s eyes. I wanted to win her favor. I wanted to show her there was nothing wrong with me.

“Hey.” Gladio’s voice behind my right ear almost made me flinch. “You gonna try any funny stuff if we get these belts off’a you?”

I didn’t know exactly what he meant by that, but I’d learned enough about human conversational tone to know what answer he wanted to hear. “No, sir.”

Noct laughed. “He’s not _sir_. Nobody’s _sir_.”

“Hey, he can call me that if he wants to.” Gladio sounded pleased. I’d answered correctly. “Nice to get a li’l respect around here for a change.”

When I first encountered these men, I was sure that they were enemies of the Empire—in fact, I was _still_ sure of that—yet I was obeying their commands. Some servant of the Great Niflheim Empire I was. I just served whoever it was in my best interest to serve at the moment, for the sake of keeping myself alive.

Some MT unit I was.

“Y’mind if I keep a hand on him while you do your thing, doc?” said Gladio, as four sets of hands began to unbuckle the straps over my body. “Just don’t wanna let our guard down and he gets somebody hurt.”

“Bearing in mind that he is unarmed, seriously concussed, and has a shattered ankle,” added Iggy, “and has been altogether quite cooperative thusfar tonight.”

Noct snorted and rolled his eyes at the other end of the table, where he was loosening the belt around my shins. “Wasn’t that cooperative when he—ow!”

“When he was _provoked_ ,” Iggy finished icily. I didn’t even see him strike Noct; I only knew it happened from the cry. “I assure you what we promised from the start, doctor: he poses no threat to you or to anyone else in this facility.”

“’Specially if I’m here to watch him,” Gladio said. Iggy gave an exasperated sigh.

After undoing the last of the buckles, Gladio laid his hand on my shoulder again, right on that spot he’d left cold when he left my side the first time. The doctor gave us both smiles even though her lips were still tight.

“Now, um…” She blinked, hard. “Sorry, it’s gotten so late—what was your name, again?”

That question again. I inhaled enough to give my designation again, but Noct spoke first.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “That’s what we were saying about that ID number. We asked him his name last night and he just… gave that ID number.”

I didn’t like the look he was giving me. There was something hollow about his eyes, and all the warm color in his face looked like it was draining away.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. “Like… my name is Noct. Something like that. Something we can call you.”

I was called by my ID. “Unit 05953234,” I mumbled.

Noct groaned. Not the right answer. My muscles grew tense.

“Dude, no offense, but I’m not gonna remember that,” he said.

“So come up with a nickname for him,” Gladio said, giving Noct a nudge. “That’s what you’d do anyway, whether he’s got a name or not.”

“Anyway, um, sir,” said the researcher, gesturing at me, “I’m going to ask you to sit up for me, but I need you to be careful with your left arm, please. You’ve got an IV in your elbow…”

It took me a long while to comply. No one had ever called me _sir_ before. _Sir_ was for commanders. _Sir_ wasn’t even for Imperial Guardsmen, as far as I could tell. It certainly wasn’t for MT units.

I still couldn’t decide if I really was one of those or not.

“I mean, what do I go off of?” Noct was saying. “I don’t know the guy.”

“Yeah, because you had to know Iggy real well before you could figure out he wears glasses,” Gladio replied.

“Sir, can you sit up?” said the researcher again, frowning. She meant me. I tried to shift forward, but my body wouldn’t move.

“Okay, he’s… he’s fast, and he’s got a fast pulse. So… you want me to call him Speedy? Speedy Gray-Skin?”

Iggy made a sharp but quiet noise, mostly breath, and at a higher pitch than his speaking voice. Even the researcher wasn’t paying attention to me anymore. All eyes had turned to Iggy. So I watched Iggy, too, but only out of the corner of my eye, in case it wasn’t the right thing to do.

“Noct,” he said, his voice weak from what I realized was laughter, “I believe the word you’re looking for is _quicksilver_.”

Gladio doubled over, his strong, deep laughter filling the small room. The researcher smiled, wide enough that her burgundy lips parted and I could see her teeth. The lines on her face deepened. I felt _safe_ again, wholly, and in new ways.

“Well, alright, Quicksilver,” she said, her voice full of levity, just like Gladio’s and Iggy’s, “can you sit on the edge of the table for me?”

Yeah. That was easy. I got my hands behind me and pushed up.

And my head _throbbed_.

Suddenly the bright lights were so searing that I still felt their burn when I closed my eyes and pressed my palms against them. The movement roiled the contents of my stomach, sloshing and gripping and burning and—

I shoved my hands down from my eyes to cover my mouth. Swallow it down. Swallow it down.

“Shit, he’s gonna puke again,” Gladio said.

My eyes shot open to the sight of a plastic-lined waste bin shoved under my nose. I swallowed, waited a beat to make sure that was the last of it for now, and then leaned away from the waste bin. My head felt too swollen to shake it “no”.

There was a firm hand on my back, quick enough that I felt the impact, but soft enough that I felt no pain. It was an unfamiliar gesture, but there was something comforting about it, especially when the hand stayed where it landed. “You good, blondie?” Gladio asked.

I nodded once, sharp and decisive, the way commanders liked. Which was a huge mistake for someone with a concussion. I clamped my hands down over my scalp and squeezed my eyes shut again, and then my stomach rolled again, and my hands went back to my mouth.

“Sure about that?” said Noct.

Another hand settled on my back, a little lower than Gladio’s. It moved in slow, small circles, leaving a trail of warmth in my skin. I was already sufficiently warm—too warm, even; I could feel myself sweating—yet I didn’t want it to stop. It made it even easier to swallow the thick, burning ooze.

“Oh.” The researcher’s voice was louder now, and her face had gone from sweet to—disgusted? Definitely urgent. “Sir, don’t—you’re going to damage your esophagus. Please.”

She shoved the bin closer to my face. There’s something about staring into the deep hole of a plausible place to vomit that makes your stomach think it’s a great time to burst, even when you know better. I squeezed my eyes shut, holding as steady as I could.

“What’s wrong? What’s he doing?” Noct asked.

The hand stopped moving in circles right when I needed it. I knew I was swaying because Gladio’s grip on my shoulder got tighter.

“He’s vomiting and swallowing it,” said the researcher.

She knew.

“Ugh, dude, gross.” Then the hand left altogether. It must have been Noct’s. I disgusted Noct. I displeased Noct and now I’d lost that warm hand, and I was going to throw up.

“Sir, if you’d just—you’ll feel better, and I’ll be able to help you if I can see this.”

Keeping his first hand on my shoulder, Gladio raised his second towards my face. Despite his slow movements, I still tried to lean away, until his fingers finally reached my hair. With the lightest of touches, he swept my hair out of my face.

“C’mon, then,” he said in his gentle rumble. “Doctor’s orders.”

It _was_ an order. It was an order from the researcher. The researcher was the one thing standing between me and—and _whatever_ had happened to all the other units from class NH-01987, and if I disobeyed her, there was no hope for me. And she knew, she already knew, about the black bile in my body just like my brothers’, about how I had hidden it for all this time. And she said she could help me.

What actually did it is when Iggy stepped in at my other side in Noct’s place, and ran a leather glove along my temple to pull the other half of my hair back from my face. I got a chill so strong and so cold that it shook me to the core. Then my core lurched and my nose was fire and my throat was raw and scraped and there it was, like a black vat of strengthening serum, but with its already putrid smell mixed with the stench of my stomach acid.

The researcher was the first to speak after that, and for a moment all she said was, in a haunted, faraway voice, “That’s not blood.”

Gladio’s fingers loosened and separated some tangles in my hair as he pulled his hand back from my face. “Well, y’know, it was a little hard to tell in the dark,” he said, and it sounded like he had more to say, but the researcher cut him off by darting away from the examination table.

“One moment,” she said, her words hurrying and stumbling as much as her pace, “I need to bring this to—the lab, I guess, I don’t—” She shifted the waste bin to hold it in one hand, grabbing her clipboard in the other. “I’ll send in a nurse, just a minute—”

I heard the door slam before I could turn my foggy head to follow her out of the room. When I turned back, Iggy was squared in front of me. His face was as stern and poised as I’d imagined when I heard his voice in the darkness. I felt my muscles tense up as if I were standing at attention for the commanders during roll call.

“Now, then,” he said. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“This is when you’re gonna get your interrogation in?” Gladio scoffed. “Right after the poor guy just hacked up some nasty MT juice?”

As if ignoring him entirely, Iggy continued, “You are an MT, correct?”

“Yessir,” I said. My voice was hoarse.

Noct snickered again. I glanced down and shivered with second thoughts, the resurgence of all those moments that proved I wasn’t truly an MT unit. There was a mess of wrappings, ice, and braces on my ankle where my faulty boot had once been, the mistake that started it all.

“I’m going to ask you something I asked you before, and I want you to be clear with me,” Iggy said. “Are all MT’s human like you?”

The question fell to pieces in my head as I tried to interpret it. _Are all MT’s human?_ No. Only the commanders and the researchers and the Imperial Guards were human. Everyone who wasn’t an MT unit was human. The three men in front of me were human. _Human like you?_ I wasn’t human. I wasn’t close to human. I was barely an MT unit, but if I couldn’t meet the standards of being an MT unit, surely I was even farther from humanity. _Are all MT’s like you?_ That was basically Iggy’s question from before, and I had tried to answer it, and neither of the answers made sense to either of us.

The sound of water running from a faucet snapped me out of my contemplation. I hadn’t even noticed when Gladio left my side, but now he was by a sink, filling a paper cup with water.

“Maybe he can’t say anything else besides ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’,” Noct grumbled. “And his weird… ID code thing.”

I pressed my lips together to hide a dark smirk. “No, sir,” I whispered, like a joke to myself.

Gladio’s head shot up. “Did he say _no_?”

He crossed back to the examination table in a single stride, and Noct leaned closer, and then all three of them were in front of me, just staring. Before I could freak out trying to figure out what they wanted from me, Gladio nudged my arm with the fist holding the paper cup of water. He extended his fingers, like he wanted me to take it.

“Drink slow,” he said, eyes gentle. “S’just water.”

“The nurse said the IV’s hydrating him,” Noct said.

“Yeah, but it ain’t washin’ out his throat,” Gladio said. “Was I the only one in the room who saw this kid throw up or what?”

I drank slowly. After my first sip, I looked around the room, seeking out the dark corners and nooks and crannies where a commander might be lurking, or another MT unit, or anyone who knew the way I was supposed to behave and was about to see me out of order.

“I’m not supposed to talk,” I said, and then I sipped more water immediately, because my throat sounded so dry and raspy.

“Not _supposed_ to?” Noct repeated, his face gathering into a snarl.

It made me shake so bad that the water in the half-full cup splashed over the edge of the rim. I had told him I wasn’t supposed to, and now he knew, and now he knew I was speaking despite all of that—

And Iggy, I could see it in his eyes, the moment he understood, before he even opened his mouth to ask, “Are you human?”

I squeezed my eyes shut. “No, sir.”

That’s why I wasn’t supposed to speak. That’s why I didn’t have a name. That’s why I was an MT unit. And now they knew.

I felt a hand grab the paper cup in my trembling hands. I thought they were going to take it from me, but the hand just stayed firm and warm against mine. When I opened my eyes, I saw Gladio’s dark hand against my pale skin.

I lifted my head. They all looked the same as before. All except Noct, who didn’t look angry anymore, somehow.

“He _looks_ human,” Gladio muttered. “Little gray in the skin, little red in the eyes, but he’s alright.”

“He’s not a robot,” said Noct. “He’s—he’s got a pulse, and a temperature, and blood pressure that gets high when he’s scared. He’s not a robot. None of them are robots.”

Gladio laid his hand on Noct’s shoulder, the same way he was laying his other hand against my knuckles. These were touches like the ones I’d give myself when we were left to idle. It was a compulsion, like rubbing my skin to warm it when it got cold, or scratching it when it itched. This _something_ between itchy and cold crawled under my skin, and the only thing that quieted it was to hold my arms close to my chest or trail my fingers down my limbs. I didn’t ever think that other people could give me touches like these. I didn’t realize it would do better than quiet that crawling feeling in my skin. I didn’t realize it would soothe my whole body and mind.

And Gladio was doing it for Noct, too, because Noct’s face was now stricken and pale.

“What makes MT’s different from humans?” Iggy asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, because MT units were so very different from humans, so obviously inferior. In fact, it was so intrinsically apparent to me that I couldn’t form a single concrete reason. I was left with my jaw hanging wordlessly, eyes screwed up with confusion.

Gladio gave a soft chuckle. His hand moved to pat my shoulder—but still, it was much too soft to hurt, it was soothing again. “Don’t hurt yourself,” he teased. “Keep drinkin’, don’t forget.”

I had forgotten. Quickly, I raised the cup to my lips. Then I remembered the command to drink _slowly_. I tipped the cup almost imperceptibly, just enough to let a small trickle trail along my dry tongue and my aching throat.

What made MT units different from humans?

“Names,” I said, almost before I had finished swallowing. I had to cough once to clear my throat. “Humans have names. And…” I glanced at Noct and Gladio. “And fathers.”

Something about my first example seemed to disappoint them. When I gave the second one, Noct looked paler than ever. Iggy narrowed his eyes, and that was always a suspect facial expression. But Gladio looked _mad_. His hand was still on my shoulder, and he was going to hit it, he was going to pull on it, he was going to lift the hand and strike me across the face—

“Did you have a mother?” said Iggy.

“Iggy, what the _hell_ ,” Gladio growled. He was squeezing now. He was squeezing and he’d squeeze up the skin so he could pinch a fold and drive a needle through it and fill my veins with that burning serum that made me vomit for days afterwards—

“Dude. You’re scaring him.”

There was a thud and a rush of air as the padding in the exam table was compressed by the weight of Noct hopping up beside me, his knee nudging against mine. Not a hard nudge like Gladio’s. Everything was soft. All of the ways they touched me were soft.

“Hey. So.” Noct’s voice was soft, too. “I don’t have a mother or father, either. And you’ve got a name, now. It’s Quicksilver. So we’re not different, right? MT’s and humans.”

He gave me a smile. It was just a half-smile, but the way his blue eyes turned so soft and kind took my racing breath away. I knew we were the same. I had known ever since I laid eyes on him.

Gladio’s face twisted with rage in the corner of my eye. I snapped my body into rigid, perfect alignment, staring forward with my chin lifted to a respectable height. No, MT units were not the same as humans. MT units were dirt. Disposable things.

“MT units are built to—” I almost said _die_. I bit the word back. “To fight.”

Gladio and Iggy leaned closer. Noct leaned away. Somehow both of those actions were devastating at the same time.

“Kind of explains that barcode tattoo, in a fucked-up way,” Gladio muttered.

Iggy slid him a sharp glare. “How were you built?” he asked me.

I shook my head, hard, even though it rattled my whole skull and made me sick to my stomach again. I couldn’t say. They couldn’t know. I was supposed to burn myself alive before they could know anything about how I was built.

“What’s wrong?” Noct said.

My voice came out as nothing more than a whisper. “I… I can’t. I can’t say. I can’t say.”

The creases in Iggy’s frown deepened. “May I ask why not?”

“I’m not supposed to.”

“Who…” The paper on the bench made a loud crinkling noise as it got caught up in Noct’s tightening fist. “Who _tells_ you this shit? Who says you’re not supposed to—to talk, or—why do you even _listen_?”

Outside the scope of simple, linear cause and effect, _why_ was still a bit of a foreign concept to me. “Those were orders,” I said lamely.

That was an end of a sentence for me. Discussions went no further. Orders are orders, and you follow them, or… well, you follow them.

“You don’t have to follow orders,” Noct said like a command. “You weren’t built to fight, and you weren’t built to follow orders. Okay?”

When his hand came down on my shoulder, I flinched. He didn’t strike me painfully. I don’t know why I flinched. Something he said made the world seem very far away until his hand touched my skin, and then it was all very, very close again.

“Okay?” he repeated, quieter, searching my eyes.

He wanted acknowledgement, but I couldn’t honestly give it. I needed clarification of the command first, humiliating as it always was to ask. “I don’t understand, sir,” I mumbled.  “Then what was I built for?”

I could recognize the intensity in his face before I asked my question. After I asked the question, all those things I could identify fell away, but there was still something terrifying and powerful in his expression. I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t hold that gaze for any longer. My eyes snapped to Iggy, then to Gladio just in case, then back to Iggy.

No one answered me.

After a long while, Iggy spoke softly. “I don’t need to know the details of how you were built,” he said. “I’m asking only for some general pointers so that we and the medical staff here can help you. Are you made entirely of organic material, or are there mechanical parts of your body?”

It was only then that I realized I didn’t even know how I was built.

“Or—organic,” I managed to say. “Uh, w—with. With. Strengthening serum.”

Iggy and Gladio gave curious frowns at that. I stared at Ignis because he was the one addressing me, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from flicking to Gladio, who I was sure was one wrong move away from ending my existence in an instant.

Gladio turned his body to Iggy, but kept his narrow eyes on me. “Testosterone, y’think?” he muttered.

“Can you tell us what was in the strengthening serum?” Iggy asked.

I could _not_ shrug. Speaking was bad, especially speaking when I had nothing of substance to say, but shrugging to avoid speaking was much, much worse. Shrugging was disrespectful, lazy, awful, despicable.

I opened my mouth and no words came out. My shoulders rose towards my ears in shaky bursts. I stared at Gladio and knew he was the last thing I was going to see before I died.

Then Gladio smirked. The creases of anger didn’t disappear from his face, but they lightened. “Shit, Noct, you’re right. He’s scared o’ me.”

“Who wouldn’t be scared of a face like that?” Noct swung a leg out to strike Gladio gently in the thigh with his boot. He nudged my arm with the back of his wrist. “Don’t worry about him. I’m his boss, and he’s not allowed to hurt you because I say he can’t.”

Gladio gave a snort of a laugh. After rolling his eyes, he nodded. Noct was his boss. Noct was a commanding officer. That explained why he could make his voice sound so authoritative. But he looked so young, and so kind.

“I’m Iggy’s boss, too, so you don’t have to be scared of him, either,” Noct added with a smile. “So. That… strengthening serum. What _do_ you know about it?”

I didn’t notice I had folded my arms and started running my hands up and down my arms until Noct’s hand came to rest on my shoulder. Words didn’t come out after the first time I inhaled and opened my mouth. I pointed limply in the direction of the door, where the researcher had carried the waste bin. When I saw all three of their heads looking for something in the doorway, I motioned towards my lips.

“The stuff you puked up,” Noct said. “It… makes you throw up like that? Or is _that_ the serum?”

I nodded, slowly, to keep my head from spinning.

“Which one?” Noct asked.

“Both,” I said.

“MT juice.” Gladio looked haunted. “So… they cram you full of it. That’s why you all—” He snapped his head to the side, wincing. “That’s why they… disintegrate into that stuff.”

I didn’t like the way his face looked or the sound of what his words meant, so I just kind of let it all slide right over my head to avoid thinking about it.

“Should we tell the doctor?” Noct said to his subordinates, sliding off of the table. “Didn’t she say she was gonna send a nurse in here, too? Where’s…”

“They’re a bit understaffed at this hour, I’m sure.” Iggy cleared his throat. His next words had an unnatural tinge to them, missing the usual lilt of his speech. “Gladio, could you stay here and keep watch while Noct and I see if we can find Dr. Medella?”

“Why can’t I just—” Noct cut off as soon as he noticed Iggy’s long stare at Gladio, then he huffed a sigh. “Oh.”

Gladio was leveling Iggy with a stare of his own. “Really?” he muttered.

Iggy did not respond verbally. He narrowed his eyes a fraction of a millimeter. I knew that look anywhere; it meant _Yes, really_.

“We’ll be right back,” Noct promised, rolling his eyes. He gave a lazy wave and a smile to me before he walked out the door.

As soon as he and Iggy were gone, Gladio said, “Alright,” and squared himself in front of me. “So… shit, this is gonna be a fun conversation.” He ran a hand through his hair. “First things first, like I said before, you’re safe here. With us, I mean. And here, this—the hospital.” He dragged his hand down his face with a sigh. “Man, I’m shit at this.”

He didn’t say anything more for a little while after that, just standing in front of me massaging his temples. My eyes wandered along the lines of ink running down his arms, looped in the shape of black feathers.

“Don’t freak out,” he said, “but we had to help the nurse get you out of your armor when we brought you here.”

He paused and stared at me for so long, I wondered if I’d missed a cue to respond.

“Yeah, we saw the scars,” he said, tracing two quick lines across each side of his chest. “And the…” He let his hand lower a little, waving in a couple vague circles around the level of his waist. “Y’know. That. So we know.”

I didn’t understand what he knew, but it made me nervous anyway.

“But we’re all good, we get it. I get it personally, that’s why they all made me be the one to tell you. See?”

He opened the left side of his jacket. The feathers along his arms joined together at his left shoulder with the head of a fierce-eyed bird. But his finger was pointing to something several inches beneath that.

“Can barely see it anymore, s’been awhile.” He traced a short line down from the areola to the base of the pectoral muscle. “My scars’re a lot smaller than yours, I got lucky. Yours’ll heal up nice soon enough. You’re lookin’ good.”

I had a number of scars across my body, both ones I remembered painfully, and ones I had always had. I didn’t know which ones he was talking about.

“So we’ll get you sorted with testosterone and anything else you need,” he said, smiling. “None o’ that serum shit, just clean man juice. Alright?”

The rising pitch of his voice indicated that I needed to give a response, and it should be affirmative to avoid conflict. Even though I barely understood a thing he had said, I nodded slowly. I was supposed to ask for clarification if my orders were unclear, but if I couldn’t even pick out what I needed clarified, I tended to hold my tongue. I was quicker to hold it when the commander was quicker to anger.

But Gladio frowned. “You alright?” he said. “Haven’t said a word. Not still scared of me, are you?”

The rising pitch there was the same sort of thing, but the grammar of his preceding statement meant that I should instead shake my head no. “No, sir,” I added, because he was upset that I hadn’t spoken.

(I was definitely still afraid of him, a little bit.)

He was still frowning. I tried not to shift my posture. The pain in my ankle wasn’t as bad anymore underneath all of the ice, but moving cut through the numbness. Plus, I remembered the first and last time my legs had gotten a little restless during roll call, which had added to the count of scars I did remember.

“I’m not getting this all wrong, right?” Gladio scratched his hair again, this time on the side, where it was cropped close to his head. “You’re… you identify as a man, right? Not a woman. Or are you something else, that’s fine, too.”

This line sent me on a journey that I was ninety-five percent sure Gladio was following through the looks on my face. I knew _man_ and _woman_. There were male commanders, and we called them _sir_. There were some female commanders, and we called them _ma’am_. I could tell them apart on sight, in a weird, intrinsic way I couldn’t put into words—maybe the same way I could tell that humans were inherently different from MT units. And that was maybe why I had never thought of the words _man_ or _woman_ as applying to MT units. Men were _he_ , women were _she_ , and MT units were _it_.

I snapped out of my barreling train of thought when Gladio laughed. He gave me a clap on the shoulder and a warm smile. “Hey, take your time. It’s a big question,” he said. “Almost as big as tryna answer why you were built.”

When I had asked Noct for clarification on this topic, he hadn’t given it. Perhaps it was because of his high rank; it wasn’t his place to clarify orders for MT units. Perhaps I was supposed to ask the likes of Gladio or Ignis instead. Then again, the officers always took asking for clarification twice on the same command as a sign of incompetence.

Maybe if I just phrased it differently, it wouldn’t count as asking the same question twice.

“Do you know why I was built?” I said softly, and after all that forethought, I almost forgot to add, “Sir?”

“Nah,” said Gladio. “Nobody but you knows that. And you might not know yet.”

I _did_ know. “I was built to fight,” I said. “I was built to fight and follow orders.”

“Somebody else told you that.” He was close enough that I could hear the way his voice rumbled in his chest like the growl of a daemon. “Nobody but you knows why you were built, because nobody but you gets to decide that. Not even the guys bossin’ you around. Got that?”

The “yessir” was already climbing up my throat on a reflex from the sound of his voice. I inhaled deeply to push it back down. I still couldn’t give truthful acknowledgement. I still didn’t get it.

“I don’t understand, sir,” I said, forcing boldness into my voice as I prepared the same question for the third time. “MT units are built to fight and follow orders. I—I’m an MT unit.”

“You’re _not_.”

His grip tightened, and then he gave me a tug towards him. I thought maybe he wanted me to get off the exam table, but he couldn’t have expected me to stand with one of my ankles broken. My face ended up falling against his jacket, cheek sunk into soft, well-worn leather. Before I could lift my head, right myself, and apologize for my awful clumsiness, the bane of my existence, the moments of absolute disgrace compared to how I handled myself on a battlefield—Gladio had an arm hooked around my shoulders, holding me in place. Not tightly enough to force me into a chokehold, though on instinct I raised my hands to block and protect my trachea.

“Or if you are, I don’t give a shit,” he said. “S’all bullshit, tryna call you different from a human, bossin’ you around, makin’ you do what they want just because they made you.” He gave a long exhale. “From now on, you’re our equal. You don’t call any of us ‘sir’ if you don’t wanna. You’re not here to follow orders. You do whatever you wanna do.”

He squeezed tighter, but still left me a wide opening in his grasp. The way out was too obvious; I wondered if I wasn’t _supposed_ to escape. As soon as that thought occurred to me, I felt warm all over.

I never gave an acknowledgement. He didn’t ask for one. It didn’t matter if I didn’t fully comprehend what he had said, because he wasn’t intending to give me orders to acknowledge.

“You alright if we still call you ‘he’ like we been doin’?” Gladio asked. “Or you want somethin’ else? I can tell the guys, no sweat.”

I wondered if that _something else_ was what should apply to MT units. But no—that didn’t seem right. At least, not for me. If I thought about it—if I considered myself like I considered the humans, man or woman—I was _man_. It came without prodding or deliberation. While the others still thought I was human—and even after I told them I wasn’t—they called me _he_ , and I didn’t even question it.

I breathed deeply. There was a scent to him that I associated with the training grounds and the armory, but it had its own unique twinge to it that had me inhaling twice as much as I needed before I answered.

“He,” I chose.

“You got it, blondie.” He gave my shoulder a pat before pulling away. “Lemme know if you change your mind, alright?”

I still felt so warm.

 

 

_ Batter my heart _

 

The rest of the night blurred together as the injury in my head exacted its increased toll on my fatigued body. I remember Iggy and the researcher discussing lab results with me—some percentage food matter, some percentage bile, some larger percentage an unknown organic substance that tested positive for something they called _starscourge_. I remember them telling me I’d go in for surgery in the morning for my foot, and for some related reason they kept asking me what my favorite food was (what did that even mean? I tried saying “hot”, because I liked when the gruel was fresh and warm, but they ended up asking me again, so I said “dinner”, because it was the largest meal, and they still didn’t seem happy, but at least they didn’t try to ask me again).

I remember Noct, again and again, coming up to Iggy, and falling limp against his chest with a sigh as Iggy patiently wrapped an arm around him. It was just like when Gladio had nudged me to fall against his shoulder and held me there. It was warm.

I remember Gladio lifting me out of a wheelchair and into a bed. I remember Noct sitting beside me and talking, and talking, and trying to show me something on a small screen that hurt my eyes, and putting it into his pocket when Iggy told him I couldn’t look at it. I remember Iggy laying a blanket over me, pulling it up to my neck, and tucking folds underneath me so that it wrapped me warm and tight.

I don’t remember falling asleep. When I woke, I felt something warm sitting in my palm.

I knew what _day_ was before I came to Lucis, the same way Lestallum knows what snow is. It was just something that happened _elsewhere_ , sort of, or at least not to me. They used to tell us that the sun emits dangerous radioactivity that could injure an unprotected MT unit.

When I opened my eyes, the room had an effervescent glow that I’d never seen from electrical lights. I looked to my right hand to see what I was holding. In my sleep, I had caught a sunbeam. I tried to lift it closer to see, but it was like any other light; it slipped through my fingers and fell to my bedside when I moved my hand.

I didn’t notice the strip of paper looped around my wrist until it slid over my tattoo. Printed on this paper was a new, unfamiliar barcode. A new ID.

I’d never heard of such a thing, but maybe it was to replace the defunct class ID I still carried. I drew my hand closer to read the new number, to commit it to memory, but the print blurred and spun under my suddenly aching eyes.

“Not yet,” said Iggy in a soft voice while I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt his hand on my wrist, gently setting it back by my side. “We won’t be able to give you an elixir to treat your concussion until after your ankle surgery. You’d best not try to read anything until then.”

My throat was dry when I inhaled to speak, and my voice came out weak. “What’s my new ID, sir?” I asked.

He paused. I opened my eyes, and found him smiling a little bit.

“The paperwork wouldn’t process to print your hospital bracelet unless I gave a name,” Iggy explained. “I made a quick translation of _quicksilver_ into ancient Lucian.” He looked over his shoulder at the window, through which the sun was filtering in. “Not too bright, is it?”

“No, sir,” I whispered, because I didn’t think I could shake my head.

He turned his smile back to me again. His eyes went dizzyingly deep in the glitter of sunlight, full of complex layers of thought that I couldn’t hope to glean from a glance at his face. But for some reason, I wasn’t afraid.

“A hospital bracelet is hardly a binding contract,” he said. “You can choose to go by a different name in the future if you’d like. But I ought to warn you that Noct and Gladio grew quite accustomed to it before they turned in for the night.”

Gladio caught my eye when he shifted, and then I saw Noct, too, because they were curled around each other in the small space of a plush armchair, eyes closed. Gladio’s long lashes fluttered open as I watched. When our eyes met, he smiled at me, and nudged the still-sleeping bundle sprawled out across his lap and chest. “Rise and shine, princess,” he teased, “Prompto’s awake.”

My new (temporary?) designation was _Prompto Argentum_. Iggy said I could think of _Argentum_ as a class ID when I asked him about it, and _Prompto_ was my unique identifier.

But Noct said, “It’s not an ID. It’s a _name_. It’s a name, because you get a name now, just like any other normal person, because that’s what you _are_.”

Noct’s eyes had been a dazzling blue in fluorescent lights alone; in sunlight, they were radiant.

“Any name you like, long as it doesn’t have any numbers in it this time,” Gladio added with a smile. “Go ahead and change it if you want. S’practically tradition for guys like us.”

Gladio sat by me and ran his fingers through my hair when a researcher came into the room to talk to Iggy, both of them glancing and gesturing at me in the midst of a conversation I couldn’t keep up with. His voice was even softer still now, so gentle I drifted off to sleep to the sound of his murmuring that it was gonna be alright, it was gonna be easy, I’d done way tougher surgeries than this before.

When I woke up, all the pain was gone.

Iggy explained what an elixir was when I started flexing my bare foot in front of me, all trace of injury gone but for a pale, thin scar running along the base of my shin. Noct issued me a strangely colored uniform, one without any armor, but with softer fabric than I could ever remember touching, let alone wearing. He shrugged as he passed the garments and shoes to me, saying, “They’re just spares of mine. Think it’s the closest we’ve got that’ll fit you.”

All the talk Gladio had given me last night about being one of his equals came rushing at me. I’d never heard of an MT unit taking on the role of a commanding officer, but that must have been what he meant if Noct was giving me one of his spare uniforms.

“Lemme know if, uh, you need… help. With it,” he stammered, scratching the back of his head and staring at the floor. “Or Gladio. You should ask Gladio.”

Gladio gave a displeased look at Noct at the mention of his name, so I was determined not to require assistance, even if given permission. I’d never learned this rule by consequence, but I was starting to pick up on these things implicitly, the more rules I learned. Sometimes, I figured, permission wasn’t all you needed. Permission was different than approval.

But maybe I should’ve asked, because when I left the lavatory after changing into my new uniform, Noct wrinkled his nose, Iggy gave an annoyed sigh, and Gladio pressed a hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh. I froze in the doorway. My knees started to shake as Noct strode towards me.

“Don’t tuck it _in_ ,” Noct grumbled. “You look like a dork.”

“Don’t think it matters whether he tucks it in or not.” Gladio had his hands planted on the edge of the bed as he gave into laughter. “You gave him the Choco-Mog shirt?”

The shirt in question, which Noct was currently yanking at so that the lower edge came untucked from the waistband of my pants, was brightly colored with predominantly yellow and white, with designs that made shapes I didn’t recognize, and bubbly-lettered words that meant nothing to me. It didn’t seem like tactical wear, but it didn’t come issued with armor, either, so perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.

“It’s—it’s what I’ve got that’s clean,” Noct said. “I was gonna do laundry when we got back to—it was all planned out, I swear. I didn’t think we were gonna…”

“You got the matchin’ hat, too?” Gladio snickered. “His hair’s a mess.”

Once the shirt was thoroughly untucked, Noct held me out at arm’s length with a scrutinizing stare. “It’s got potential,” he said, and he held out one hand to empty air.

And then the air wasn’t empty anymore. With a shimmering flourish of blue light, a palm-sized bottle appeared in his hand.

(And Iggy let out another very audible sigh, and Gladio groaned, “Aw, no.”)

“C’mon, it’s just so he looks okay before we get him to the hotel for a shower,” Noct insisted, squirting out a dollop of viscous liquid from the bottle into his palm. “Hold still for a sec, Prompto.”

It was like swaying on the edge of a cliff, standing there on the precipice of what I was starting to recognize but did not want to believe was true. I was terrified to see what I knew lay beyond the edge—what I needed to face—for fear that I would fall instead.

In that same glistening light, the one that Iggy and Gladio had pulled their weapons from last night, the very same one that I had been warned about since the beginning of my existence, the bottle disappeared into thin air. Staring intently at my face, Noct rubbed the gel between his fingers before lifting them to run through my hair. The touch of the tacky substance was cool, and smelled of something fresh and sweet. It dried quickly in the direction that Noct swept my hair, leaving it standing on end. He had a slight smile as he worked, through which the tip of his tongue sometimes poked. I found myself staring at his lips to see if I could catch the next glimpse of it emerging.

I had already fallen by that point, hadn’t I?

“You makin’ his hair look like a chocobo butt to match?” Gladio teased.

“Shut up, Gladio,” Noct called over his shoulder. “I’m not done.”

Iggy sighed for the third time, and this time he rolled his eyes, too. “Noctis, you hardly need make a masterpiece out of—”

_Noctis_. It all fell into place.

“Noctis,” I repeated. “Noctis Lucis Caelum. Heir to the Lucian throne. The—the prophecy. The Chosen King.”

That was why his dark hair, his blue eyes, his soft face looked so familiar. I had seen this face so many times before, in so many briefings. It had taken me this long to recognize it because the only images I had seen before were unflattering, poorly lit photographs of his gaunt grimace, the same one flickering across his face now.

“Yeah,” he said, staring pointedly at my hair. His hands barely paused in their work. “What about it?”

Iggy and Gladio were advancing towards us from behind him, and if looks could kill, I’d be too dead to say what spilled out of my mouth next.

“I’m,” I stammered, “I’m supposed to kill you on sight.”

A larger shimmer of blue light came this time, in Gladio’s hand. The full length and breadth of his greatsword glistened in terrifying detail as he drew closer. “Get away from him, Noct,” he growled.

Noct didn’t budge. His hands kept running through my hair. “Are you?” he asked. “Gonna kill me, I mean.”

My mouth hung open for a moment, helpless and wordless. “I was ordered to,” I choked out.

Calculations that had once been comforts stuffed my throat and twisted my gut. When he raised his chin to see over the top of my head, I had perfect access to his trachea and carotid arteries. His arms were raised high enough that I could deal a blow to his gut before he could block it. I could slip my arms under his and flip him to the ground.

“So?” said Noct. “Are you gonna do it?”

I could. The opportunity was perfect. He was unarmed. Gladio’s sword loomed in the background, but that would only strike me after I completed my mission. I would be revered.

I would be dead.

No, maybe I wouldn’t be dead. If instead of focusing on killing the prince first, I took all three of them on in combat, then I might stand a chance. I was completely unarmed, but if I could disarm Gladio and take his weapon from him, that would change the tide. It was an uneven matchup, one that I had almost lost last night, but now that my injuries had healed—now that _they_ had _treated_ my injuries—

I choked on my racing breath when I felt warm liquid trickling down over my lower eyelids. I’d cried before—of course I’d cried before, I’d cried more times than I could count—but I’d never felt the tears creep up out of nowhere like this, and never so many. I couldn’t see through the saltwater without blinking more tears down to my cheeks and onto my eyelashes.

“Put it _away_ , Gladio,” Noct commanded.

He had turned around to point at the sword in Gladio’s hand. If Gladio put it away, I could attack while he was unarmed. And Gladio had to put it away, because Noct was his commanding officer, and Noct had ordered him to do it.

“ _Fuck_ no,” said Gladio instead.

Noct got a look in his eyes that I knew to my core, because it was all that made my core. It was a terror deadened by the acceptance of one’s helplessness, that nameless emotion that comes after realizing there’s no point in being afraid when there’s nothing you can control about your situation anyway.

I didn’t realize I was holding my hand out towards him until it met Gladio’s instead. He wrenched my fingers back as he pushed my arm away. Before I had time to react, his palm was coming towards my eyes. His handspan fit over my whole face, hot fingertips squeezing my temples as he shoved against my head. With a final push, he released me. I blinked in the sudden light to find myself a few stumbled steps back from where I had been standing.

Gladio spared a brief glance at his hand before he turned to Noct, who was shouting his name. He was too focused on both me and on Noct to process it further, but a small part of him, I realized, was wondering why his hand was wet. It was about the same size as the same small part of me that was wondering why something wet had smeared across my cheeks when he grabbed me.

Noct stole the opportunity afforded by this distraction to slide past Gladio, standing directly in front of me with his arms spread. Gladio’s furious glare returned at full force.

“The hell are you doin’?!” he snarled. “Don’t turn your _back_ on him.”

“He’s not gonna kill me, Gladio!” Noct said.

“I didn’t hear _him_ say that. Get behind me.”

It was my fault, my mistake. I shouldn’t have tried to reach again, not with Gladio as vigilant and suspicious of me as he had every right to be. I deserved the shouts rattling in my ears and the greatsword pointed at my throat for thinking I, a failure of an MT unit, had the right to put my hand on Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum.

He just looked so scared, so much like me, and I’d learned that all it took to settle that feeling twisting in my gut and buzzing through my blood was a touch on the shoulder. He and his subordinates had given me so much, I guess I wanted to give something back.

I was too frozen with fear when the blade came at my neck to move an inch—not to remove my hand from Noct’s shoulder, not even to blink when the tears started piling up so high I couldn’t see what was happening around me. Everything felt so loud, but it must have been that no one was saying a word, because after what seemed like forever, I heard Noct’s question through my racing thoughts crystal-clear: “Are you gonna try to kill me, Prompto?”

I took my first gasping breath in the past thirty seconds and it sounded as obnoxiously pitiful and weak as I felt. My hand squeezed harder on his shoulder. I was holding onto him not just for his sake, but for mine. In a voice that sounded nothing like my own, I said words I’d never said before my life, because I’d never understood them until now.

“I don’t want to.”

Beyond the wall of tears in my eyes, something blue flashed. Once I mustered the nerve to blink and clear my vision, the greatsword was gone. I stole a glance at Gladio, too brief to read anything in his face, but I don’t think it was anger.

Iggy’s arm slid between me and Noct. He pulled Noct towards him, away from me. My fingertips caught in the hem of Noct’s short-sleeved shirt, a feeble last protest until he was out of reach.

“Ignis, wait,” Noctis said. “ _Wait_. Prompto.”

I waited. I froze in place at his command. It was all I could do for him, if they wouldn’t permit me to touch him. The only way an MT unit had to show its respect was obedience.

“Are you gonna kill me?” Noct asked. The sound of anger crept anxiously into his voice. “You were ordered to kill me. Tell me right now, are you gonna try to do it?”

The only way an MT unit had to show its respect was obedience.

“I don’t want to,” I whispered again.

“I _know_ , Prompto,” he said, and something trembled in his sonorous tone. “But are you gonna do it anyway?”

MT units didn’t have names. They were called _it_. They didn’t have feelings. They didn’t speak. They didn’t obey Lucian order. They acted for the good of the Empire even in the face of certain death.

“What if I tell you all the orders you’ve ever received are—are _null_ and _void_ ,” stated Prince Noctis, “and from now on, you do whatever you want.”

They didn’t _want_. I _wanted_.

“Except—that’s not an order, either,” Noct cut in hastily. In vain, he pushed closer to me against Ignis’s steadfast hold around his chest. “Okay? You can… still follow your orders, if that’s what you want to do. If you want to obey whatever those— _assholes_ in Niflheim told you to do. But they’re not _here_ anymore.”

_You’re out of Niflheim, y’know?_ he had said, and now I understood.

“They’re not—Prompto, I would—” He surged forward with a burst of energy such that Ignis barely contained him with the strained mutter of _Highness_. “—I’d personally _murder_ anybody who came here and tried to force you to follow their orders again. You don’t have to do anything they want you to do.”

I understood, like the first time I heard them say, _You’re safe,_ and felt everything they meant by it _._

“Not because I want to live, but because I want _you_ to live.”

Humans talked about _life_. With MT units, they didn’t say _life_. We didn’t have _lives_ , we weren’t _living_. They called it _existence_. I’d always kept that distinction in my vocabulary, but now I understood the difference.

“I want you to be free.”

I had never thought about the word _free_ before, but now, I already knew what it felt like. It was right in front of me. It felt like Noct’s shoulders in my hands and the tears flooding me with warmth as they kept falling. All I had to do was speak, and claim it.

“I wanna be free,” I squeaked.

I could speak whenever I wanted now.

Noct’s shoulders dipped as he exhaled with a lopsided smile, like he’d been holding his breath for a long time. Iggy gently unwound his arms from around Noct’s body. I met his eyes with trepidation, blinking through the last of my tears. His stare was deep, but kind.

I jumped at the heavy clap on my shoulder from behind—Gladio. “Aight, that’s settled,” he said in a voice like joyful thunder.

“That’s settled,” Noct agreed on a breathless sigh.

He lifted his arm and put it on my other shoulder. He gave another heavy, smiling sigh when I mirrored him. I gave his shoulder a searching squeeze. It was solid, bony, but firm with muscle, a lot like mine, and warm.

“Well, then, gentlemen,” said Iggy, “shall we be on our way?”

 

After we left the hospital, I figured out what they meant by _favorite food_ , because I ate mine for the first time. Or so I thought, until dinner, when I ate my new favorite food. And then the next morning, when I ate my _new_ new favorite food. Iggy kept smiling with a hint of mischief every time I looked up at him with love in my eyes for the new recipe he’d put in front of me, murmuring with a teasing lilt, “How will I be able to outdo myself next time?” And yet he always did.

In retrospect I don’t really know how it happened, or why. They could have left me on my own after they had to head out of town to their next destination, or ditched me after we were through with everything at the hospital, or abandoned me out in the night with my broken ankle and my concussion, or they could have just killed me in that fight and been done with it all. But somehow I ended up in their car, leaning my head out of the passenger-side window and watching the road fly past as the wind whipped through my hair, which I’d learned to style myself. I had a pair of pistols to call my own, and they said I’d be tagging along with them on bounty hunts to earn my keep for what my stay at the hospital had cost them.

Those hunts came and went, and they were still giving me nods and telling me to hop in the car for another ride. I knew it wasn’t an order, and that’s exactly why I got in.


End file.
